Decoys Stop Helping the Dogs!

In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:

Training proactive, powerful dogs in proactivity.

Preventing early queues in training to your canine.

Teaching your dog that their actions initiate activity from the target.

Morphing reactivity into proactivity.

Having a training progression to move away from the handler and decoy help of early foundational training.

Key Takeaways:

You want your dog to be willing to initiate, even if there's no reaction or triggers from the decoy.

As humans, it is easy for us to identify that a random extremity is part of a larger human being. It takes dogs longer to look at that picture and figure out that what they are seeing is attached to the target, which is a passive human being.

Have a plan if your dog is struggling with proactivity to go back to foundational elements. Don't get in the habit of assisting them with movement every time.

Allow context to work for you. Avoid creating anticipation and let the training and context work by changing the picture the dog sees.

"So don't be lazy. Set up your civil sessions, your scenarios, and make sure as the dog comes into the training area that we're setting up these situations that were not leaving clues on the ground in the form of equipment." —  Jerry Bradshaw